Risk,rent seeking and the social cost of monopoly power

Some recent empirical studies that have estimated the social cost of monopoly power have included in these estimates observed monopoly rents as a proxy for the unobserved value of the resources expended by rent seekers. This has involved adding these estimates of resources wasted by rent seekers to estimates of deadweight welfare loss triangles so as to produce an overall estimate of the social cost of monopoly. The present paper points out that each firm seeking a monopoly rent flow not only may be uncertain about obtaining the flow but also about retaining it in future periods. It is shown that this is likely to cause the proportion of the rent flow converted into social cost to be well below 100% regardless of whether the rent sought is small relative to initial wealth and regardless of whether rent seekers are risk-neutral or risk-averse. These findings demonstrate that large errors are likely to be made in monopoly welfare loss studies if observed monopoly rents continue to be employed as a measure of the value of resources used in rent-seeking activities.     

Rent seeking and the value of time

This paper focuses on the question of how rivals’ rent-seeking expenditures and investment expenditures are affected by the temporal dimension of those cash flows as well as the timing of the cash flow of monopoly rents. The paper applies methods from statistical reliability theory to derive five propositions establishing the conditions that must be satisfied if the rivals apportion their rent seeking and investment expenditures to maximize their certainty equivalents of the monopoly rent. The propositions explicate the responses of the rivals to changes in economic parameters characterizing the rent-seeking contest such as a change in the duration of the monopoly rent cash flow or a change in the number of rivals.     

Rent-seeking in a unionised monopoly

A unionised monopoly firm, benefitting from some kind of anti-competitive regulation, and its corresponding trade union have a common interest in spending resources to protect the monopoly rents created by the regulation. In the present paper, a situation in which the unionised monopoly is challenged by a consumer organisation fighting for deregulation is analysed as a standard Tullock rent-seeking contest. With unequal sharing of monopoly rents, the free-riding incentives among the rent-defending players turn out to be overwhelming, in the sense that the unique Nash equilibrium is characterised by zero effort contribution by the player with the lower valuation of the contested prize. This implies that being “strong”, in terms of bargaining strength, is not necessarily an advantage for neither player in a unionised monopoly that is threatened by deregulation. Received: June 2000 / accepted: January 2001     

产权住房选择性供给支持中的激励规制风险研究

在经济适用住房的供给中,政府通过土地划拨、价格规制等方式选择性支持中低收入人群解决住房问题。在拓展垄断产品供给的激励规制模型下,构建经济适用住房供给支持的激励规制模型,分析存在信息偏在和规制俘获情况下的政府激励规制风险。同时,给出最佳规制情况下政府为弥合信息偏在风险所支付的信息租金、高成本企业效率损失租金以及政府为维护社会公平风险所支付的公平租金,并基于此探讨我国经济适用住房政策未来的改革方向。     

City of Rents: The limits to the Barcelona model of urban competitiveness

The turn towards the knowledge‐based economy and creative strategies to enhance urban competitiveness within it has been well documented. Yet too little has been said to date about the transformation of land use for new productive activities, and the contradictions inherent to this process. Our case study is Barcelona, an erstwhile ‘model’ for urban regeneration which has sought to transform itself into a global knowledge city since 2000. Through the lens of Marxian value theory, and Harvey's writing on urban monopoly rents especially, we show how the 22@Barcelona project — conceived with received wisdom about the determinants of urban knowledge‐based competitiveness in mind — amounted to an exercise in the capture of monopoly rents, driven by the compulsion of public sector institutions, financiers and developers to pursue rental profit‐maximizing opportunities through the mobilization of land as a financial asset.     

The role of property rights in the positive theory of monopoly

The traditional approach to monopoly posits a dead-weight loss, a classic inefficiency, wherever market power is discovered. Critics such as Joseph Schumpeter argue that such dead-weight losses are inconsequential in a dynamic setting, where long-run trade-offs are said to dominate them with postive sum gains, which are also claimed to flow from market power. Yet further examination reveals that even the static monopoly argument showing Pareto inefficiency is not due to a positive analysis but is an outcome determined by the normative interpretation of the monopolist's property rights. The costs which a firm possessing market power has in expanding its output are not considered as legitimate for inclusion in our analysis. (In other markets, traders are sometimes allowed to collect such rents without being labeled as inefficient—for instance, in the labor market.) The interesting questions become: Why have economists adopted this particular normative view of property rights? Is public policy thereby well served?     

Corporate venturing and the rent cycle

This study views entrepreneurial rents as renewable opportunities and explores how firms can effectively utilize corporate venturing to create and sustain economic rents. Schumpeterian entrepreneurs create rents by harnessing corporate venturing to exploit attractive economic opportunities. The Schumpeterian rent is composed of Ricardian and Austrian rents. Ricardian rents result from unique and non-reproducible characteristics or competencies of the firm, and hence, are not appropriable by imitators. Conversely, Austrian rents, or economic profit, are subject to dissipation by imitators and attract entry by competitors or Austrian entrepreneurs until they are bid to zero or destroyed by another Schumpeterian innovation. In this formulation, Austrian entrepreneurs are modeled as infra-marginal rent seekers. Consequently, to sustain rents, firms must cycle between using corporate venturing to create or discover Schumpeterian entrepreneurial opportunities and using venturing as a mechanism to exploit existing rent generating opportunities.     

Endogenous institutions in bureaucratic compliance games

We consider a set-up where two governments have either conflicting or matching preferences on the provision of differentiated (local) goods supplied by a common monopoly bureau. We develop a two-stage game. At stage-1, the two governments decide whether or not to merge into a single institution. At stage-2, all players simultaneously and independently take their decisions in terms of production and rents, with perfect knowledge of the other players' strategies. We solve the subgame perfect Nash equilibrium of this game, and show that, if the bureau immediately updates its objective function to institutional changes, then the governments always prefer merging. However, if there is an initial bureaucratic inertia in adjusting the bureau's objective function to the institutional change, then ruling politicians may prefer decentralisation to centralisation, depending on the strategic properties of the compliance game and on their own discounting. Received: May 1999 / Accepted April 2000     

Do governments tax agglomeration rents?

Empirical evidence suggests that firms receive rents from locating in economic agglomerations and industry clusters. Using the German local business tax as a testing ground, we empirically investigate whether these agglomeration rents are taxable for local governments. The analysis exploits a rich data source on the population of German plants to construct measures for the communities’ agglomeration characteristics. The findings indicate that economic agglomerations and industry clusters exert a positive impact on the jurisdictional tax rate choice. Further analysis moreover suggests that a municipality’s potential to tax agglomeration rents depends on its firm and industry agglomeration relative to neighboring communities. To account for potential endogeneity problems, our analysis exploits long-lagged population and infrastructure variables as instruments for the agglomeration measures.     

Surprofits et rentes foncières dans la ville capitaliste

In the capitalist city, ground rents reflect for capital the image of its own development and uneven growth, by imposing upon each particular capital the laws of capital as a whole. Therefore, landed property and rent are neither the regulators of urbanization, nor the source of urban contradictions. Capitalist relations of production imply in themselves the autonomy of private poles of accumulation and deny the possibility of a real social control over the formation of the useful effects of agglomeration. These effects thus necessarily constitute for particular capitals non-reproducible or unevenly preconstituted conditions, and consequently so is the basis of surplus profits which can be transformed into ground rents. The existence of strictly non-reproducible conditions is the foundation of the transformation of branch surplus profits into absolute rent, the unevenly preconstituted conditions inducing differential surplus profits transformable into differential rent. It is the non-reproducibility of the commodity itself which is at the basis of surplus profits and monopoly rents. The transformation of these surplus profits into rents in no way implies the existence of a class of landowners, but only relations of production in which landed property is not only autonomous from capital, but also includes a social content which as such can put up an effective resistance to it. The basis of this resistance can as well be capitalist landed property as various forms of non-capitalist landed property.     

Hidden monopsony rents in winner‐take‐all markets—sport and economic contribution of Spanish soccer players

In labor markets where few companies compete for many workers, economic theory predicts monopsony rents. Surprisingly, soccer clubs do not profit from the expected rents. The purpose of this study is to explain such contradictory evidence. Our model and empirical test, using data obtained from the Spanish professional soccer league for the season 2001/2002, suggests that monopsony rents that the clubs were to obtain from most of the soccer players would eventually revert to the superstars. The study also illustrates that the market value of players stems both from their sporting performance and their economic contribution. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

互联网3.0时代的平台经济模式与发展策略

以平台企业为主体,以云计算、区块链等智能技术为支撑的平台生态系统可以高效且规模化地匹配零散需求与供给,成为互联网经济时代下所有经济活动和经济关系的总和,即平台经济。平台经济有利于创造多元商业模式,提升经济运转效率。但平台经济收益是非线性的,具有网络效应且极易形成市场垄断,对监管造成极大困难;平台经济模式的非对称议价行为使平台客户权益难以保护。由此,分别从企业平台化转型和政府监管两个维度提出了具体发展策略:选择合适的平台经济模式,变革传统组织架构,培养平台经济模式下的新技能;鼓励平台经济发展,以协同理念对平台经济进行全方位监管。     

治理价格垄断行为的有效途径

价格垄断行为束缚企业发展,使经济发展不确定性增强,通胀压力加大,对我国经济危害日益严重。当前要从维护正常的市场竞争的角度出发,加大对价格垄断行为的治理力度,优化经济发展环境。     

Economic rents and mutual fund performance: An empirical investigation

We investigate the monthly returns of 377 open-end mutual funds during the September 1981–1994 period to learn whether economic rents can be garnered through the judicious selection of the advertising and sales method in the mutual fund industry. Specifically, we seek to learn whether direct sales or mass marketing produces economic rents under the assumption that those rents would be passed on to consumers to build a “high quality” image to differentiate the product line. Results suggest that no-load funds produce superior net returns except in the aggressive growth category.     

THEORIES OF MONOPOLY CAPITALISM

Abstract. This article presents a survey of theories of monopoly capitalism. The defining characteristic of monopoly capitalism is that developed capitalist economies are seen as essentially dominated by firms which operate in oligopolistic industries. It discusses in chronological order the contributions of Hilferding, Lenin, Kalecki, Steindl, Baran and Sweezy, and Cowling to the monopoly capitalism approach. By drawing out some common features of the authors discussed we arrive at an implicit view of the nature of theories of monopoly capitalism. The macroeconomic aspects of monopoly capitalism are discussed with emphasis on the implications for the level of economic activity. A further section discusses the international aspects of the monopoly capital approach. The final section of the paper reviews criticisms of the theories of monopoly capitalism with concentration on those advanced from a Marxist perspective.     

基于WEB的网络视频监控技术研究

将视频监控与Internet相结合,通过浏览器进行远程监控。使用VFW软件包,通过摄像头实现对视频信号的采集、编码、存储以及视频数据的网络传输;PC机将作为Web服务器在Internet上发布实时监控信息。实现远程用户在不使用第三方插件的情况下使用浏览器实施监控。满足视频应用程序开发的需要。     

Taxation of natural resources and economic growth in Russia's regions

We examine the impact of natural resources on economic growth in Russia's regions since the introduction of the mineral tax in 2002. Using novel measures of regional natural resource rents (mineral tax collections), we demonstrate that non-hydrocarbon wealth has had a slightly positive and hydrocarbon wealth has had no to a slightly negative effect on regional growth since 2002, although mineral-rich regions are richer than other regions. The absence of significant growth benefits to resource-endowed regions is at odds with the beneficial impact of natural resources, and particularly hydrocarbons, on the growth of the country as a whole. We discuss the reasons for this outcome and conclude that the central government was successful in taxing away incremental regional resource rents during 2002–2011, while preserving the pre-2002 regional rents.     

Whose wages do unions raise? A dynamic model of unionism and wage rate determination for young men

We estimate the union premium for young men over a period of declining unionization (1980–87) through a procedure which identifies the alternative sources of the endogeneity of union status. While we estimate the average increase in wages resulting from union employment to be in excess of 20% we find that the return to unobserved heterogeneity operating through union status is substantial and that the union premium is highly variable. We also find that the premium is sensitive to the form of sorting allowed in estimation. Moreover, the data are consistent with comparative advantage sorting. Our results suggest that the unobserved heterogeneity which positively contributes to the likelihood of union membership is associated with higher wages. We are unable, however, to determine whether this is due to the ability of these workers to extract monopoly rents or whether it reflects the more demanding hiring standards of employers faced by union wages. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Oil dependence and entrepreneurship: Non-linear evidence

This study examines the empirical nature of the oil dependence-entrepreneurship nexus, building on recent research that extends the “resource curse” beyond its effects on economic growth. For the period from 2006 to 2018, the sample includes 115 countries at various stages of economic development. Using panel threshold methods, we discover an inverted U-shaped relationship, indicating that even small increases in oil rents increase entrepreneurship below the threshold. Globally, oil rents above a threshold of 77 % stifle entrepreneurship. Regional differences and institutional vulnerability act as moderators.     

技术标准中的知识产权垄断和反垄断问题

技术标准化与知识产权结合的必要性已在业界达成共识,两者的结合带来了巨大的经济利益,但是也产生了一系列的垄断后果。为了规避这些垄断后果及其带来的负面影响,文章介绍了反垄断对策并对相关垄断问题进行法律规制的设想进行了探讨。